Why Librarians Have the Blues

Throughout large swaths of library-land, there is angst.

"Will people even go to libraries in ten years?" "People think everything should be online, and if it's not in Google after two seconds of searching they give up."  "If we put up a page in Facebook, won't the kids think that's super lame of the library?"

Etc., etc.,  etc.

Recently I've had something of an epiphany about these issues--not really a revelation, but rather a new way of thinking that made the stakes more clear to me.

Premises:

1. Everyone must develop information-seeking skills to function; even illiterate people discover how to find out what they need to know.  People's information-seeking is  often wildly inefficient, and on countless times per day individuals fail to discover something that is exactly on target and extremely useful to them.  But they find enough to soldier on, and they do it by themselves. Autonomy is highly important, to librarians too--I certainly never ask for help when I enter a new library.

2. Librarians seek to help people doing research, and can do great things whenever they establish a relationship with someone.  But people generally don't ask for help because they don't know what they don't know, and even without the help of a librarian they often earn great esteem in their chosen professions.

3. Other fields--teaching, electrical engineering, whatever--require developing a set of skills that are less fundamental to human functioning. So these fields garner respect because they seem "unique." 

But because the librarian is an expert in something that everyone knows how to do to some extent--finding and organizing information--this expertise is harder to appreciate.

Conclusion:

These are not hopeless days to be a librarian. It's actually very exciting, because we have an opportunity to re-shape a profession that doesn't come along very often. But we won't get there by telling people we can do a better search than they can--that may be true, but it's not persuasive. We have to find better ways of demonstrating real and unique value.

Your ideas are welcome.